Imagine you walk four miles from your house and find a toxic waste dump you have never seen or heard about. Imagine you find that this site has been running for years without your knowledge or input. Imagine that this dump is in the process of creating an incinerator that will produce massive amounts of pollution. Now imagine that your effort to learn about the process and request to be involved with voting on the project is met with indifference. This is the story of the citizens of Kettleman City, California in the early eighties.
This agricultural community was faced with this reality in the early eighties after finding out about the waste facility in a story run in a local newspaper, highlighting the maleficence of Chem Waste and the huge number of fines they have been paying for their irresponsible practices. They were upset to learn about this plant but, being largely Hispanic, thought they had no way of changing anything. Then in 1988, a member of Greenpeace called a friend in Kettleman City to find out if they were attending a meeting to discuss building a toxic waste incinerator on the property. The answer: “I had no idea there was a meeting or plans to build this facility.”
Why were the residents kept in the dark about this process? They were mostly poor, religious, Latino people and that is exactly what Chem Waste was looking for. In 1984, a report that was paid for by California taxpayers was released. This report, known as the Cerrell Report, encouraged companies who were looking to open these kind of facilities look at communities that were full of poor, uneducated people with a small population that worked primarily resource intensive jobs, such as agriculture. The residents began to look at trends and found that the other two Class I incinerators in California were in Buttonwillow and Westmorland. These communities fit the mold of Kettleman City to a T. They dug further and found that other sites around the country included Emelle, Alabama, the south side of Chicago, Port Arthur, Texas and Sauget, Illinois. What do these places have in common: The residents were primarily black and Latino.
What can low educated, non-English speaking people do about this outrage? The citizens of Kettleman City decided to attend the meeting and voice their concerns about the proposed incinerator and object to it being built. They drove forty miles to the meeting, only to be met with an all-white board, who, when asked to provide translators, directed the group of 200 to the back of the room, and sit in twenty five chairs with a single translator for them. They also received an abridged version of and Environmental Impact Statement; five pages in length rather than the 300 pages given to English speaking residents of the county. This is very similar to the civil rights violations African Americans endured in this country. The residents voiced their opinions, petitioned to reject Chem Waste’s proposal, but the council approved the measure anyway.
Left with no choice, these citizens filed a lawsuit that found that the EIS did not thoroughly analyze the potential harm from the plant and that the citizens of Kettleman City were not given the chance to meaningfully weigh in on the process. Finally in 1993, Chem Waste decided to withdraw their plan, citing changing economic conditions for their decision, but I think it is obvious that the plant would be here today had it not been for the strong people of Kettleman City and their constant struggle to keep their community clean and their voice heard.
Written and researched by Bill Rosenberg
